The advent of computers and their continued technological advancement has revolutionized the manner in which people work and live. Information that used to be available only in written or verbal form is becoming increasingly available in electronic form. Furthermore, presentations which used to be available only on particular recording media (e.g., film or tape) or via television broadcasts are now available in digital form (e.g., over the Internet).
One problem encountered by users when faced with this continually increasing mass of digital information is the ability to locate particular information that the user is interested in. For example, trying to locate a particular presentation can be difficult and cumbersome for users. Various search mechanisms exist for pre-recorded “on-demand” presentations (e.g., various world wide web search engines). On-demand presentations are fairly easily searchable because the underlying data of the presentation is already known. However, in the case of live presentations, such underlying data is not known because, as the presentation is live, the underlying data is not available yet.
Some systems do exist that allow a user to identify scheduled live presentations. For example, a television programming guide may be available over the Internet that allows a user to search for television programs that are scheduled to be broadcast (e.g., via cable, satellite system, or typical television broadcast frequencies, such as UHF or VHF) and their associated broadcast times. However, such programming guides typically do not provide the flexibility to allow non-scheduled programs to be identified to the user. Furthermore, such programming guides are typically limited to television broadcasts and do not allow users to identify presentations from any of the wide variety of alternate sources (such as via the Internet).
The invention described below addresses these disadvantages, providing a way to search for live presentations.